


Wisdom is in the mouth not the mind (apparently)

by NicePlaceToBe



Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/M, Idiots in Love, Mutual Pining, pretty much no one is related
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-29
Updated: 2020-03-29
Packaged: 2021-02-28 23:00:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,804
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23375056
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NicePlaceToBe/pseuds/NicePlaceToBe
Summary: When Vanya got her wisdom teeth out, it looked like she'd lost all her intelligence with it; because why, why would she send the mysterious and smart and so handsome-that-it-made-it-hard-to-concentrate TA that email?Or:'You're my very attractive TA that I emailed when I was high on pain meds and now I can't look you in the eye' AU
Relationships: Allison Hargreeves & Klaus Hargreeves & Vanya Hargreeves, Number Five | The Boy/Vanya Hargreeves
Comments: 8
Kudos: 267





	Wisdom is in the mouth not the mind (apparently)

**Author's Note:**

> SO. This is something. 
> 
> Don't quite know what was going through my brain but the prompt was cool so I gave it a crack 
> 
> Note that Allison and Vanya are the only ones related here, and everyone is coming from a non-Reginald Hargreeves background because they deserve better. 
> 
> Let me know what you think! It's a little rushed but I did what I could!

**Start of Semester**

Vanya doesn’t know what she expected for a Teacher’s Assistant in a basic mathematics course.

It was not, however, a boy with piercing blue eyes and a sharp jawline with quick quips and a stubborn streak a mile wide.

Because as soon as he got up there to teach them in the fourth lesson of sem, she knew she was absolutely fucked.

————————————————————

**Now**

Vanya doesn’t remember what she did last night. Which was weird, because she didn’t didn’t drink much.In fact, unless Vanya was asked out by her sister Allison and her group of friends who had adopted her when she was first year uni, she pretty much kept to herself. 

But as she moved to sit up, her entire jaw ached- and she remembered she had been high as a kite on pain meds last night because she’d just had her wisdom teeth taken out.

“Woah, easy there tiger,” Klaus called from the hallway as he waltzed into her dorm room. “How are you feeling?”

“‘M sore. And tired. Think they gave me the wrong dose ‘cause I can’t remember anythin’,” she slurred slightly, jaw still swollen.

“Well you are small, they might have overestimated you,” Ben said as he followed Klaus into her space.

“Fuck you Ben not ev’ryone is six foot.”

“I’m five foot nine Vanya. I’m not a tall bloke, you’re just really small.”

She sighed and threw a hand across her face as light started to filter in through the window.

“Are _any_ of you ‘ere to sympathise with me in my time of need?”

“No,” Allison answered as she sauntered through the door.

Vanya wondered when her room became a fucking holiday destination and detour for college kids that didn’t respect the sanctity of the morning (and how the hell did they get into her room, she didn’t leave the door unlocked).

“I’m so lucky to have a sister like you, with friends who are so delightful-“ she stumbled on the last word, with too many consonants to pronounce with a lopsided mouth.

“Oh you love us,” Klaus interrupted, patting her knee as he sat down on her bed.

“Anyway, we were coming by to see if you were coming to class? We’ve got basic maths with the TA you can’t stop staring at.”

“I feel like I’m death warmed up, I’m not going to that class,” Vanya groaned. “An’ I don’ stare at him,” she added, slightly petulantly. 

“It’s ok, everyone stares at him. He’s hot. And he stares back at you, you know Vanya,” Klaus sing-singed. Vanya glared at him. 

“Is this Number guy? He’s the reason you’re all going to pass the course right?”

Ben had taken the class last year with the same professor but a different TA and had challenged Allison, Vanya and Klaus to see if they could scrape a passing grade in his mathematics class- with all their arts and humanities majors. He was still vaguely salty about the fact that they were going to pass. While he had to make up the marks in extra credit, because the teacher was useless and his TA had been incompetent, _they_ were going to pass. 

“His nam’ is Five,” Vanya’s voice was slightly muffled from its position shoved under the pillow, as if not being able to see them meant that they weren’t there.

“And he’s got the hots for you?”

“No-“

“Yes, he does! He’s never interested in anyone, he even turned down Delores last year. But I swear he never takes his eyes off Vanya in class-“ Allison crowed.

“Ok, time for you all to go!” Vanya interrupted, shifting out of bed to start pushing her sister and the two boys towards the door.

“So you’re not coming? What _will_ we tell Five-?” Klaus asked with a shit-eating grin even as she shoved them out into the corridor.

“I doubt he’ll notice,” Vanya snipped back.

(But she wondered, remembering that intense blue gaze that she sometimes met with her own and his handsome profile as he listened in on the lectures- snorting derisively in some parts, wherein he would begin when he took the class once a week every fortnight. Usually he took the time to unteach them whatever their professor had said and then help them relearn the correct method- which he obviously didn’t enjoy, but he was meticulous and encouraged people to ask questions so “you won’t lose marks in the test on easy shit because you were scared of losing your reputation as ‘smart’ or ‘cool’ or whatever. This is college, no one gives a crap. Don’t waste your money being an asshole because you _chose_ to be here.”

He was maybe a little eccentric and intense but Vanya was intrigued by him, much as she was loathe to admit it to Allison, Ben or Klaus- or even herself.)

It suddenly struck her that she should send an email to let the teacher know she wasn’t coming- but if memory served, this was supposed to be Five’s lesson to teach, so she should probably email him instead.

Except when she opened her computer to do just that, she was filled with horror. It seemed her past self from last night (in her lost time that she couldn’t remember) had taken it upon herself to email ahead of time.

_Fuck._

_——————————————————————————_

Sent at 11.37 pm

_Dear Professor Hargreeves TA Five sir_

_I’m in your basic mahtematics class and I’ve just reealised that du to the fact Ive just gotten my wisdom teeth slashed out I won’t be attending classs. At the start of sem you said to email if werent coming and ud send the work so thats what I’m doinggg now. it was nice of you to offer that bc even if your in class it kicks your ass and you dont seem like a aproacable person bt your better than professor name I cnat remmemeber. That such a weird word its like bananaana bc you just get n rythm w the letters an it gets all confusing._

_Everyone litarally drools over yu in class epcially when your teaching- chat is that the pants you wear hsould be illlegal bc youre unfairly attractative. Anyway thnks for sending the work bc I really don’t want to fail ive got a point to prove and I promise ill laugh at your jokes now bc they ae funny youre just intimiidating. And hot did I mention hat??? doens’t matter, i like you anyway_

_bye_

_this is vanya btw_

——————————————————————————

Five doesn’t forget things. He sees them, he understands them, they are now a part of him brain. Simple as that.

He does however, seem to have forgotten one easy but crucial part of his job description.

_Don’t sleep with any of the students._

He hasn’t done it- Five never felt the need to, besides most of the people in the classes he has TA’d for weren’t particularly bright and Five can’t stand being around people whose brains don’t work on the same frequency as him. So he had never even considered it. Until he met Vanya.

Five had come to discover that some people considered him handsome. It was the most frustrating thing, because then they didn’t listen and if they didn’t listen to him then they were all guaranteed to fail this particular class with the inept professor on their final exam. And then _Five_ would have to mark all those exams and slowly lose the will to live as he read through incorrect and _stupid_ answers.

Walking into that class felt like condemning himself to torture- he just didn’t know what kind. Because as soon as his eyes landed on her, he was hooked. She was everything you could ever think of and nothing you could ever see. Eclipsing and intoxicating, she filled a space that you would never notice was there but once she was gone, oh how you could never miss it. 

He couldn’t put his finger on it (her wide smile, the sound of her laughter, the way her hair fell across her shoulders, the tune she would always hum wherever she went or the inherent goodness she seemed to exude) but he knew that Vanya Smirnov was something special.

Unfortunately, because of the circumstances under which they met (though Five doubts it would have mattered, he’d have a snowball’s chance in hell with Vanya no matter what lifetime they were in) Five can’t make a move. He wasn’t socially adept to begin with, but there were a heap of rules he’d have to toe if he were to date a student in his class ( _only for another few weeks,_ some part of his brain reminded him but he shoved that thought away).

So he watched her, got to know her from a vague distance. He couldn’t help himself, he knew it was slightly weird, but there was something about her. Five was pretty sure she wouldn’t know his name, or if she did, she wouldn’t be able to pick him out of a line-up.

He did his best to control his thoughts about her (not taking that light sigh of happiness she gave at the end of class out of context or imagining the way she said his name, how it slipped from her lips and sounded a little like a prayer when he shared the study guide for the exam to everyone, or the way her attention is entirely on him when he teaches and she bites her lips and licks them and-) but there’s not a whole lot he can do about his manifesting subconsciousness in his dreams except avoiding sleep. He’s been running on three hours sleep and caffeine rushing through his veins instead of blood but he crashed last night into a dreamless sleep.

When he opened his emails that morning, he was pretty sure he was still dreaming. There was no way Vanya had sent that to him, he was hallucinating from lack of sleep. His face grew hot when she called him (what he assumed was) ‘unfairly attractive’ and he laughed a little at her frankness.

_She must have been on pain meds from getting out her wisdom teeth,_ Five thought, as he snapped his laptop shut and headed out for class, a grin plastered on his face. 

(‘ _I like you’_ she said- and Five could only let the hope live quietly in his heart.)

———————————————————————————

_Why_ would she _do_ that?

She would never be able to face him again. She would rather burst into flames than tell her incredibly _uninterested_ TA that she’d been tripping on drugs and since she was crushing on him she had somehow decided that it was absolutely necessary to send an email detailing that he was ‘intimidating’ and ‘hot’.

Vanya was torn between sending another message along the lines of ‘please disregard all previous communication from this address, I was hacked’ or just praying he hadn’t seen it and ignoring its existence, hoping he would do the same. She nervously waited until the lecture time was up to call Allison and Klaus about the class

“Did anything interesting happen today?” Vanya asked, trying to mask her mounting anxiety. 

“Not really, we just revised the stuff Prof taught us.”

“So Five retaught pretty much the entire syllabus?” 

“Yep,” Klaus told her. “But he was _smiling_. And not like the one he gives people when they’re being idiots. Like an _actual_ smile.”

“Oh and he asked about you as well. Said you sent him some sort of email about your wisdom teeth, and he wanted to see how you were doing.” Allison added, and the Cheshire Cat grin was audible in her tone.

Vanya practically choked. “Fuck. Oh shit he saw it and he knows and I can never show my face in there again-“

“Vanya, what was in that email?” Allison asked calmly but with the obvious potential that she was excited to hear the answer. 

“I fucked up I fucked up, I’m sending you a screenshot now.”

There was a pause while the other two looked at it and then howls of laughter came crackling down the line.

“So when you said you didn’t remember anything-“

“I meant literally nothing, otherwise I wouldn’t have sent this _stupid_ email!”

“It’s not really that bad,” Allison consoled. 

“I told him that he was unfairly attractive and that I liked him!” Vanya whined. 

“Well he doesn’t know what that means!”

“It’s not exactly open ended Allison!”

“Vanya, Five isn’t really a social butterfly. And as a male myself I can tell you there is plenty to be confused about in that statement, women are a mystery-“

“We’re not a mystery, we’re actually an open book. And this is pretty damn obvious. What do I _do_?”

“Wait to see what he does next time you see him,”

“This is mortifying, I’d rather live in a hole than go to that class.”

“This is the most exciting thing that’s happened in this course all semester,” Klaus sounded delighted and Vanya drew strength from the fact that she managed to refrain from trying to throttle him down the other end of the line. 

—————————————————————————

Vanya spent the whole weekend working herself in and out of states of panic about going to the lecture on Monday- which was _certainly_ not helped by Five’s simple response of sending the work through, a simultaneous relief and stress point. But when the day arrived, she found she didn’t have much choice. Allison and Klaus showed up to her dorm again and practically frogmarched her there, barely giving her any time to pull clothes off the floor to wear. She considered making a break for it, but with a guard on each elbow and both deliriously excited to see the fallout, Vanya doubted she would make it very far.

She picked the door nearest to the exit and immediately buried herself in the task of finding her notes and computer, trying to appear invisible. In fact, she was so busy being immersed in the task that she actually did miss Five’s entrance, as he came into the classroom and ghosted past her desk.

The whole lecture she tried to focus on whatever Professor Windbag was saying, but she found her eyes sliding to Five at a dangerous frequency. The one time he caught and held her gaze, Vanya froze slightly- that stare could get you into trouble, she sensed.

(Watching her like that, a smirk playing on his lips and something unidentifiable in his eyes- it set her insides on fire and her mind alight with scenarios where he might look at her like that when there wasn’t anyone else in the room.) 

Vanya swallowed hard and averted her eyes. (She didn’t let him catch her looking again.) 

When she left, she tossed a ‘ _Thank you for sending the work_ ,’ over her shoulder and then hurried out.

Stupid, _stupid_ , she berated herself as she booked it out of there.

(But she couldn't make Five’s smirk disappear from her mind.) 

————————————————————————

The second lesson went much in the same way, but Five called out before she could leave. 

“Ms Smirnov, a word please?”

Cursing both herself for getting into this situation and her friends for enjoying it so much, she approached her TA. 

“You can call me Vanya,” she said lamely, trying to forestall a chat along the lines of _I’m just not interested_ or potentially getting laughed at to her face.

“Vanya. I just wanted to check that you got all the content from the lesson you missed.” His words were innocent, but his eyes spoke volumes and Vanya was glad she didn’t stutter as she replied. 

“Yep I did thank you Mr-“

“You can call me Five,” he said with a smirk, and Vanya continued, trying not to think about that. 

( _‘You can call me Five’_ he would murmur against her lips in response to her moans as he ran his hand under her shirt, ‘ _no need to call me God. You can most certainly fuck me though’-_ because he _would_ be a smart-ass like that, and that was the exact kind of thing she should _not_ be thinking about-)

“Well thank you for sending it, _great_ lesson but I am running late so if you’ll excuse me-“

So Vanya’s a coward. At least she knows it.

————————————————————————

Five wasn’t a particularly patient person.

He left the first two lessons for Vanya to get acclimated to the new material in the curriculum but the next lesson when she tried to pull the same tricks by sitting near the door, Five slid into the desk next to her before her friends could. She blushed, but otherwise didn’t acknowledge his presence, letting her hair fall like a brown curtain between them. Unfortunately for Vanya, patience never has been one of Five’s virtues. 

“Vanya?”

Surprised, she jumped slightly at the sound of his voice. 

“Oh, uh, hi Five,” she greeted, albeit nervously.

He wanted to ask so many things then. _How do your teeth feel? How are you finding this class? Why did you send that email? Do_ you _drool over me? Can you seriously not tell how enamoured I am with you? Why do you keep running away from me?_

Instead, he got out a lame question about what she did with her weekend and what all three of them wanted clarification on for his lesson in a few days time. He nodded to their responses and suppressed a laugh at the glares Vanya shot her friends for shutting up all of a sudden, but internally he was irritated with himself. Why was it that Vanya made him so nervous?

He sat with them for the whole lesson and Five couldn’t help himself from critiquing the teacher’s technique aloud.

“Don’t do that, no one can hear you, you have to face us. Come on, even a little bit of inflection wouldn’t kill you. It’s like you don’t _want_ anyone to listen. No, don’t do that. No. No, you’re going to get the wrong answer. I’m going to have to redo this whole fucking lesson you prick. You have _one_ job. _One._ Where did you learn this, it's not even in the realm of half right-” 

Five initially didn’t notice Vanya struggling to contain her laughter as she watched the boy next to her rip a new one into the supposed expert, but when her shoulders started shaking even as she bit her lip, he smirked lightly.

“Holding up your promise to laugh at my jokes?” he whispered, inclining his head towards her. 

Vanya had forgotten, if only for a brief moment, about that email- but hearing him say that sobered her immediately. There were fifteen minutes left in the lecture, but she made a split-second decision, gathering all her things. 

Five realised his mistake instantly, as she disappeared at the speed of light. 

“Shit.” He cursed, falling back in his chair. 

—————————————————————————

Vanya didn’t want to go to class. But if she didn’t go, she was guaranteed to fail and then she would owe Ben ten bucks for not passing. And if nothing else (courageous, confident, witty, _brave_ ), Vanya was broke- she really couldn't afford that ten bucks. So it would seem that- once again- she didn't have a choice. 

“Maybe he didn’t mean what you thought he meant,” Klaus suggested as they strode across campus, struggling slightly to keep up with Vanya's brisk pace. 

“No, he meant exactly what he said.” Vanya replied grimly.

She had resigned herself to it- some mistakes cannot be fixed, they simply must be. She would just have to live with the fact that Five was unattainable and that she had monumentally embarrassed herself- maybe one day it would be a funny story. But not now, as she pushed the door open and slid into a chair a minute before the class was due to start. Vanya knew they had been pushing it but she wasn’t prepared to spend any more time than strictly necessary in this room.

This time, Vanya met his eye and held it during the lecture. Five couldn’t help but wonder if she knew she was biting her lip- or if she knew it was driving him just a little bit insane thinking about if she would let him bite her lip and run his tongue over it to soothe it-

He dropped her gaze this time.

Five had a voice that dipped into a rough timbre and dripped innuendo and suggestion and Vanya really wished she could focus on the words rather than the tone that sent shivers down her spine. It made it difficult to take notes on all the things he was saying when it felt like every syllable washed over her and created a flurry of tense nerves in its place. 

Somehow, time slipped away and he was dismissing them before saying, 

“Can I just discuss the assignment with you, Vanya?”

Fuck.

She hung around until everyone had left (because she got the feeling this conversation wasn’t one she wanted overheard). 

“You wanted to talk to me?”

“You’ve been avoiding me.” He challenged, eyes alight. 

“You’re my TA for one class,” she rebuffed. “I can’t avoid you if there’s nothing to avoid. We don’t know each other.”

“Hmm, an email you sent me a few weeks ago would beg to differ,” Five responded, moving towards her and his tone slid into a range that implied something filthy in the words he spoke. 

“I- I’d just had my wisdom teeth removed, that was incredibly inappropriate of me.” Vanya breathed, eyes trailing his jaw as he let a lazy grin cross his face.

“That sounds plausible. But do you know what I think?” He leaned in slightly closer, belying the casual air he was holding. 

Vanya couldn’t think much because she was struggling to stop the images of Five pressing her against the desk and kissing her senseless.

“And what’s that?”

“I think,” Five continued, “you might have been telling the truth. And that you feel this just as much as I do.”

He moved forward slightly, until his lips were ghosting over hers.

“Tell me to stop.”

Vanya didn’t want to.

She leaned into him and everything she had been thinking about him since the beginning of semester was poured into that kiss, as they tangled their tongues and his lips moved desperately against hers. Vanya felt as if her body were on fire and as he slid his hands under her thighs and lifted her up slightly, pushing her into the wall, she couldn’t help but grin.

(It wasn’t exactly what she’d imagined when she got told she would have to take her wisdom teeth out, but she sure as hell wasn’t complaining.)

————————————————

“Unfairly attractive am I?”

“Oh shut up,”

“See if you can make me, Smirnov,”

“I’m sure I’ll think of _something_."


End file.
